Let's go crazy

Does love actually make you crazy, or is it really the other way around? Mental illness has been the psychic engine of some more convincing modern romantic comedies—see Punch-Drunk Love (2002)—perhaps because it places an obstacle between lovers and coital consummation where, in a post-sexual revolution universe, there might otherwise not be. That’s certainly the case with the tweaking twosome in David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, in which a manic schoolteacher (Bradley Cooper) newly released from a state hospital—where he was placed after nearly beating his wife’s lover to death— meets a young cop’s widow (Jennifer Lawrence) with impulse control issues who’s been flirting with nymphomania. He’s adopted a program of blind optimism and is obsessed with reuniting with his estranged spouse; she’s focusing her ferocious energies on preparing for a dance contest. Given that’s he the subject of a restraining order, he needs a secret marriage-mending go-between; given that the sort of dance she has in mind generally works better with two people, she needs a partner. So they make a deal, go out on Halloween Raisin Bran-and-tea dates, crazy shit happens, more crazy people enter the picture, bumpity-bum-bum, da-ta-da-ta-da. 

But when I say “crazy,” I don’t mean crazy-crazy, like real-life crazy, but rather that special we’re-in-a-crazy-movie kind of crazy that allows for ids to run rabid in the name of controlled comic chaos; not the sort of crazy that leads to tragedy, despair or, in the case of John Cassavetes’ movies, that most fragile, unnerving, eerily exhilarating sort of equilibrium. The characters in Silver Linings Playbook, based on Matthew Quick’s eponymous novel, are only as crazy as they need to be to keep the story’s central conceits afloat for the film’s duration; as we near resolution, the craziness is fully contained. Near the top of the film our protagonist chucks a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls through a window—not out, but through it—from frenzied disgust for its scandalizing, downbeat finale. He demands happy endings from his stories, and we know that come hell or high water—or in this case, flagrant, flailing dance floor amateurism and football triumph—he’s going to get one. So yes, under its batshit guise of high neurosis, this is deceptively close to being a perfectly conventional rom-com. 

And so what? The big picture feels a bit pedestrian, but scene-by-scene Silver Linings Playbook is giddily inspired. Cooper’s nothing if not committed, a little scary, a lot talky, running around his parents neighbourhood with a trash bag over his torso so he can sweat better. Lawrence brings nothing but wild conviction and drive to her secondary role. She’s got feral Medusa stares, is seductive in a way that makes you want to remove sharp objects from the house when she comes over for dinner. And the supporting cast populates Russell’s suburban Philadelphia milieu with memorable, distinctive neuroses of their own, most especially Robert De Niro, terrific as Cooper’s OCD bookie dad, who’s insanely superstitious about sports. Russell’s movies run on anxiety, urgency and carefully tuned babble, and everyone gets some great dialogue. The final scenes kind of blow it, the dance-off most of all, since it keeps cutting away to reaction shots to remind us how we’re supposed to feel. But whatever, if you don’t have a good time with Silver Linings Playbook, you’re nuts. 

Shit his dad says

The title of the source material, a memoir by poet and playwright Nick Flynn, is Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. The title of the movie, scripted and directed by Paul Weitz, is Being Flynn. I don’t know about you, but this discrepancy in tone already gave me pause—would this adaptation suck all the bite from the book and replace it with middlebrow Hollywood bullshit? The good news is: not really. Being Flynn exudes polished, pedestrian, professional directorial style, but its heart’s in the right place, by which I mean a tough-minded, tough-love kind of place. This is the story about a boy trying to become a man while living in the dual-shadow of a suicided mother and a long-absent, crazy motherfucker of a father who returns to this boy’s life when he shows up one night looking for a bed at the homeless shelter where the boy works. Too late, obviously, to make up for lost time—the boy’s now in his 20s—but just in time to challenge the boy’s undigested notions about maybe-kinda becoming a writer. Jonathan Flynn never published a word in his life, yet even as a going-on-elderly homeless drunken babbler, he remains convinced of his innate literary genius. And of his son Nick’s inheritance of this genius.

So yes, like many a memoir this is also the story of a writer discovering his craft. Thankfully, rather than spending time watching the writer try to write, Being Flynn focuses on the experiences that engender literary insight. Nick (Paul Dano) is uneasy with any career path that might make explicit his creative desire, so, following his father’s oft-stated and, as it turns out, ironic dictum that “we are put on this earth to help other people,” he works night shifts trying to give a modicum of comfort to the city’s downtrodden. The movie’s depiction of life at the shelter gets a surprising number of things right, partially through casting the likes of Lily Taylor, Wes Studi and Eddie Rouse as Nick’s more experienced colleagues, partially through Weitz’s uncondescending framing of the shelter’s clients.

Nick may be Being Flynn’s protagonist but its star performance is unquestionably Robert De Niro’s Jonathan. The movie wisely capitalizes on De Niro’s iconic status, rendering Jonathan as a variation on Travis Bickle some 30-odd years after Taxi Driver. Not just because Jonathan’s last job was driving cab, but because, like Travis, Jonathan regards himself as possessing some rarefied, god-like view of mankind in all its frailty, a view that allows him to go on manic, fevered rants against homosexuals, women and racial minorities. Neither Weitz nor De Niro strain to ingratiate Jonathan to us, understanding that it’s up to Nick to figure out how to come to terms with his father’s less palatable attitudes. And without resorting to mere camp, De Niro has an awful lot of fun with Jonathan, singing “You Are MEE-eee!” to his son from his skinny cot or throwing a tantrum while wearing a makeshift toga. And Jonathan does have things to teach his son about what it means to be a writer. The key midpoint scene involves Jonathan calling his son on the fact that he’s working at the shelter to gather material. Nick, horrified, denies this. Indeed, it isn’t the whole truth, but, make no mistake, it is a truth, and the proof is in Flynn’s book and in this flawed but very worthwhile movie.

Untapped potential: Limitless

Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) was just another New York slob dodging his landlord and trying to write a science fiction novel about “the plight of the individual in the 21st century” until he ran into his shifty ex-brother-in-law and got hooked on NZT 48, an experimental underground drug that grants imbibers access to those proverbial underused regions of the brain. Suddenly everything Eddie’s ever read, heard, or seen becomes organized and available. He finishes his book in four days, wins back his girl (Bright Star’s Abbie Cornish), learns multiple languages, and masters the stock exchange. The side effects? Paranoia, some vertiginous crashing, and a nasty addiction. He also has ever-burgeoning gaps of missing time. During one such gap he may have even killed someone—but Eddie’s got other things to worry about. Like getting rich, impressing Robert De Niro’s mega-mogul, and surviving business ties with the Russian mafia.

Pay It Forward producer/screenwriter Leslie Dixon based Limitless on Alan Glynn’s The Dark Fields. Glynn’s novel came out in 2001, but the premise feels more resonant in 2011 and its everything/everywhere/all-the-time access to data via portable technology (which some depressingly predict will eventually be wired into our bodies). Its deeply fertile premise is finally what carries Limitless, which is never less than engaging. Dixon’s script is fun and structurally inventive (including a pleasingly abrupt little bitch-slap of an ending) yet curiously generic (it’s so focused on being a solid, twisty thriller that it seems to forget that it could potentially be so much more). Meanwhile, Neil Burger’s direction mirrors that of his effects-fussy, thematically kindred 2006 breakthrough The Illusionist. His teaser/opening credits sequence feels like a trailer and seems especially inspired by Google Earth. His camera likes to zip through windshields and hair salons. There’s too much music cluttering the soundtrack and far too many cutesy, overly illustrative visual enhancements, such as the fridge magnet letters showering down on Eddie while he plunges headlong into writing. This tale of fantastical drug abuse could have benefited from a sober approach. Or David Fincher. Or, come to think of it, David Cronenberg, and his cool insights into the latent beast within.

As you consider all that Eddie might accomplish under NZT you start to realize not only how frustratingly limited Limitless’ imaginative circuitry is but also how much of a selfish prick Eddie is. Which is a perfectly legitimate way to go: film noir is full of guys like this, compellingly repulsive antiheroes hard-wired to look out exclusively for number one. The problem is that Eddie’s not written or realized in a way that seems cognizant of his character flaws (the movie wants to like him too much), and thus fails to exploit these flaws for good, gritty drama. Cooper’s fine in the role, but brings nothing extra, nothing that imbues Eddie with that special quality that makes you both envious and appalled, wondering how you might get your hands on some of what he’s got. Perhaps we’ll be seeing more stories like this one in the coming years, stories driven by our apparent urge to merge the mind with someone’s ideal computer gadget. Perhaps these other stories will go farther. In the meantime, Limitless is worth checking in with, if only to ponder the outer limits (of which this would have made a pretty good episode).

Stone: do you hear what he hears?

When Jack Mabry (Robert De Niro) calls upon his pastor for spiritual advice he’s told that god speaks to us in mysterious ways, though the pastor may not have imagined the Lord being channeled through a cornrow-sporting, pornographically minded, trash-talking convicted arsonist when he offered up that old chestnut. Mabry’s a parole officer on the verge of retirement, his last case to close being the aforementioned Gerald “Stone” Creeson (Edward Norton), who for all his abrasive locker room jive seems to have a good heart and an earnest desire to get out of jail and get his shit together. Stone comes across some New Agey pamphlet in the prison library that promises spiritual awakening to those who listen for the right sound, those ready to become god’s tuning fork. Stone’s awakening comes one day during lunch while staring at a nature scene mural on the mess hall wall.

Stone was written by Angus MacLachlan, who previously wrote the script for Junebug, based on his own play. Directed by Phil Morrison, Junebug was buoyed on a warm embracing of eccentricity and subtle playfulness with form. Stone, directed by John Curran, is far more somber and downplays its characters’ quirks, though it’s very easy to imagine its premise yielding a comedy, particularly once we factor Stone’s wife Lucetta (Milla Jovovich) into the mix, a talented seductress who's big into the healing power of magnets and aims to boost her husband’s chances of early release by getting cozy with Mabry. As wildly different in tone as Junebug and Stone are, their similarities constitute much of what’s most fascinating in both films: an interest in the line that divides religious practice from spiritual thirst, and in the fundamental role outsiders play in shaping a given community. I settled in for Stone mildly intrigued but expecting little. I was surprised by how deftly that sense of intrigue blossomed and held on right to the end.

Curran’s previous directorial credits include The Painted Veil and We Don’t Live Here Anymore, so it’s no wonder that he seems to take a special interest in flushing out the themes of marital disharmony in MacLachlan’s text. Stone spends much of his first encounter with Mabry boasting about how his wife’s a dime and quite possibly a nymphomaniac, while at the dame time insisting that she’s an alien—that’s the word he uses, “alien,” as in someone from another planet. (Was this picture made before or after The Fourth Kind?) Stone wants to know about Mabry’s marriage, how it works, how sexual interest is sustained over the decades, but Mabry proves to be the real stone in this relationship, refusing to disclose any personal details. The truth is that Mabry’s marriage to Madylyn (Frances Conroy), a tippling Bible thumper, appears deeply unhappy, probably sexless, and has probably been that way from the start, as the film’s disturbing prologue set in the early days of their domestic life clearly implies. This prologue is in fact utterly unnecessary—there’s no reason at all for us to know the specifics of Mabry’s dark side, and this dramatization, awkwardly using younger actors to play De Niro and Conroy, feels like something demanded by outside forces with little faith in an audience’s ability to read between the lines.

Curran doesn’t have the charm or penchant for aesthetic detours that Morrison displayed, but I wonder if his approach isn’t actually more closely aligned to MacLachlan’s intentions. In any case, I don’t think anything he does here really hurts the story’s integrity, and the device of manifesting Stone’s obsession with listening for that magic sound through an aural landscape of Christian radio broadcasts, insect buzzing, and an immersive piece of glassy ambient music from Jon Brion is accumulatively effective. As well, Curran should perhaps take some credit for bringing out the best in his leads. There’s an engrossing chemistry between De Niro and Norton, and a near palpable heat coming off of Jovovich, who imbues what could have been a one-dimensional supporting role with considerable complexity.

I'm not claiming the film is entirely successful on every front, but I worry that some viewers—most certainly some critics—might be put off by Stone simply because it’s hard to tell what this film’s trying to be. I’ve seen it described as a thriller, which feels way off the mark, and I’ve read Manohla Dargis’ New York Times review, which tries to finger at as failed neo-noir, which seems even more off the rails. Stone doesn’t adhere to genre, not does it defy genre in any flamboyant way. I don’t know what to call it, but I think its ambitions are noble and the results substantial… if you only listen closely enough.

Travelin' Dad: Everybody's Fine

Retired after a life of coating cables in PVC, his kids now scattered across the country, his wife’s death still a fresh wound, Frank Goode (Robert De Niro) has nothing but time. The prospect of a rare gathering of the surviving clan has him unloading wads of cash on a new barbecue, heaps of filet mignon, and fancy wine he knows nothing about. It’s all the more heart-wrenching then when all four of his kids call to cancel at the last minute. Even at this early stage in Everybody’s Fine events conspire to gut Frank—and the rest of us—emotionally. But Frank’s a trooper. He packs a small suitcase and sets out to visit his offspring whether they like it or not. So we have here a road movie of sorts, one where each stop yields fresh revelations about Frank’s ostensibly perfect family, the lot having long ago made a pact to withhold from dad all their disappointments, shortcomings, or personal tragedies.

Writer/director Kirk Jones’ remake of the 1990 Italian tearjerker employs some shrewd devices to deliver exposition while sticking closely to Frank’s point-of-view. The telephone wires Frank passes as he’s whisked around the country courtesy of Amtrak or Greyhound emit conversations between his children informing us of troubles unknown to him, and the blur of nostalgia that has Frank “see” his children in their pint-sized versions when they reunite in the present, building up to a dream sequence in which present-day Frank converses with a bunch of ten-year-olds about precisely those matters his adult kids won’t discuss. This last bit could have been something strange and interesting, yet Jones’ execution of these devices is across the board pretty corny—almost as corny as the light gags about Frank’s inability to use chopsticks, or Dario Marianelli’s sappy score. Everybody’s Fine is a movie determined to keep its aim safely within range of the middlebrow, its protracted denouement letting no opportunity to tie up every last possible knot, revealing a conspicuous paucity of faith in its audience’s imagination. Yet for all that, you know, the movie really works.

This is partly due to De Niro, so relaxed in his own skin, never crowding his fellow actors in any given scene, so deft with conveying bottled-up feelings, so touching in the simplest moments—the way he stifles a broader smile when he coerces his eldest daughter to say out loud that she’s a partner in his ad agency; his understated playing of the scene where he phones his own house just to hear his dead wife’s voice on the answering machine. But the greater credit is due to the essential wisdom of the story, which for all its schmaltz never rings false, at least not in the ways that really count. It’s a story about confronting that powerful myth that all your hard work will ensure you some autumnal reward in the shape of your children's successes. A lot of us have fathers like Frank, working class guys who push too hard, who we can’t bear to disappoint. Some of us are Frank—though I have a harder time seeing this aging widower going out to see this sort of movie. The point is that Everybody’s Fine isn’t very artful, but it is truthful, and quite moving. Sometimes that’s fine enough.

Los Angeles plays itself, as do Sean Penn and Bruce Willis, in What Just Happened

Ben’s typical day involves a great deal of driving and talking on the phone—he’s an Angelino, don’t you know. He visits ex-wives and drops kids at school. He visits therapists. He speaks with agents, actors, directors, editors and studio higher-ups and exudes a reasonableness with each of them that stands out favorably in a milieu riddled with tantrums, neuroses and stumbling twelve-steppers. He does lunch. He placates, boosts, councils and consoles and when his back’s against the wall, which is often, he negotiates. He also dyes his chest hair, but that hint of desperate inner quirk he does in private. He’s presumably in his 60s, but looks pretty good. He works in the movies, and for all his outer calm, he’s barely hanging on.

Based on a fairly balls-out memoir of long-term mastication within the capricious dental work of Hollywood, What Just Happened finds prolific producer Art Linson, a.k.a. Ben, embodied by prolific actor Robert De Niro, who, as it happens, has starred in numerous Linson-produced projects, including The Untouchables, Heat and Great Expectations. The film also features an “as himself” cameo from Sean Penn, who also starred in several Linson projects, such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Casualties of War and We’re No Angels, which co-starred De Niro. Penn’s spouse, Robin Wright Penn, plays De Niro’s ex-spouse and the person he’s still closest to. Catherine Keener, who recently starred in Linson’s Into the Wild, which was directed by Sean Penn, plays De Niro’s boss, a woman of such chilling authority she need never raise her voice. Does it go without saying that Linson produced the film, as well as adapted his own book?

There’s a long, thick history of self-castigating Hollywood comedies featuring actual Hollywood people playing themselves and intermingling with Hollywood actors playing semi-fictionalized Hollywood people. This strategy supplies Sunset Boulevard, to name a particularly sublime example, with some of its richest, most delicious intertextualities. That term sounds highfalutin, but it serves to remind us just how populist postmodernism can be when dealing with household name cultural icons. It also speaks to a cultural segment still sufficiently movie-obsessed to happily pass hours playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. But is this segment obsessed enough, and large enough, to constitute a substantial audience for What Just Happened?

As directed by Barry Levinson—who gave us a far more outrageous self-castigating Hollywood comedy with Wag the Dog—the film probably isn’t castigating enough, or funny enough, or scandalous enough, to reel in the masses. And it’s kind of a shame, because while What Just Happened fizzles in its final act, while many of its satirical targets, no doubt based in actual events, finally feel like clichés, it has many nuanced observations, some terribly, amusingly sad scenes of personal meltdown, and a very well gauged performance from De Niro, who has a knack for playing containment that doesn’t just read as mere resignation. His Ben is a welcome twist on the notion of the all-powerful producer. He is man required to juggle many balls at once, and who might just care about art, too. (Just scan Linson's filmography and you'll see a commitment to less-than crowd-pleasing projects.)

He has a director, played by Toronto-bred Michael Wincott as a manic, strung-out Keith Richards wannabe, who won’t remove a scene of a dog getting shot in the head from his final cut, despite scathing audience previews. “My wife is still crying, asshole!” reads one of the cards. Another simply reads “FUCK YOU!” He has a rabid actor, Bruce Willis, playing himself, who refuses to shave off a burly beard despite threats by the studio to pull the plug on a picture days away from production. The beard thing—will Willis shave? will he at least go down to a goatee? a moustache?—is the film’s main source of suspense. I guess that might not have you gripping your armrests, yet, you know, there’s something sobering, something perversely fascinating, about just how pivotal the presence of the absence of a beard is on the outcome of a multi-million dollar business venture and numerous careers.

Righteous Kill: cop buddies bugger the better sex subplot

Righteous Kill was written by Russell Gewirtz, the same guy who wrote Inside Man. Like the earlier movie, this serial killer thriller and rabidly macho buddy cop caper bristles with conflicted ambitions toward making something that’s both smart and base, a genre work for the sleaze hungry and the beard-strokers alike. It’s a tough gambit, especially without a director of Spike Lee’s shrewd audacity and style to help pull it off, but I’m actually impressed how relatively well it works, even if it all inevitably evaporates under the heat of its own sketchy conceit.

From the start we’re encouraged to see verge-of-retirement hard-ass homicide detectives Cowan (Robert De Niro) and Fisk (Al Pacino) as platonic lovers of unyielding fidelity. They literally shoot their loads side by each at the firing range, cheer each other on during cop baseball games, sing each other’s praises to anyone who’ll listen, even parrot each other’s deflective one-liners when separately grilled by the NYPD shrink. When early on the corny looking faux-CCTV video footage of Cowan confessing to going on an extended vigilante killing spree begins its piecemeal interjections into the drama proper we know that these old pals will follow each other to the precipice of destruction. It’s only a question of whether one will follow the other right over the edge.

The economy of characters in Gewirtz’s script is itself a source of dynamicism, keeping his leads surrounded by numerous closely-watching potential adversaries nearly all of the time: the younger detectives Riley (Donnie Wahlberg) and Perez (John Leguizamo), who begin to suspect that the “poetry killer” of various local scumbags must be a cop; the amiable but stern Lieutenant Hingus (Brain Dennehy, a highly welcome face, and one that’s aged into an uncannily resemblance to Milan Kundera), who has a good poker face but seems all too aware he’s got a loose cannon on his hands; and crime scene investigator Karen (Carla Gugino, a highly welcome everything), a girl who likes her sex extremely rough and is currently being obliged by Cowan, their proximity giving her access to his private life if not quite his inner life.

Director Jon Avnet, whose long resume includes jobs as, um, diverse as Fried Green Tomatoes and 88 Minutes, gets down to the grunt work from the get-go, keeping the camera whizzing around and the cuts a-flying like Tony Scott on auto-pilot. He’s hardly the most sensitive filmmaker, but he keeps things moving—whether they want to move or not. With this fidgety style, he can’t quite perform the subtle slight-of-hand Gewirtz’s script is crying out for, and to be fair I’m not sure anyone could. The big reversal is telegraphed pretty far in advance and once you catch on to what’s really happening in Righteous Kill you may or may not want to bother sticking with it—the movie slowly becomes about the clever reversal itself instead of the meatier themes of loyalty and justice it lays claims to.

More disappointing for me is the neglect of the Karen character. The most interesting thing in The Score was Robert De Niro’s girlfriend, played by the sorrowfully underused Angela Bassett. Likewise, the most interesting thing in Righteous Kill is easily De Niro’s relationship with Gugino, an enormously delicate negotiation of trust, sex and maybe, just maybe, love, or something like it. Gugino brings tremendous texture, sass and dignity to a character that, far from being a conventional love interest, could have been difficult or impossible for the audience to identify with. This being De Niro’s movie, it’s just as important that her character has the potential to tell us a lot about Cowan. It’s a shame then that her Karen gets more or less brushed aside as the film hurtles toward its big, sloppy, scenery-chewing climax.

Fact is, he was talkin' to all of us

The yellow cab emerges silent, hulking, opaque and phantom-like out of the plumes of steam that waft up from the gutters, the gauzy, rain-slick streets bleed super-saturated reds and blues, the brass and snare drum conjure up oppressive waves of portent, and finally the darkness parts its curtain for God’s lonely man to make his entrance. He comes from nowhere, peers the world through slatted fingers, and can’t make convincing small talk to save his life. By his own claims he’s a Vietnam vet, an ex-marine, with no friends or family with whom he can connect or accept consolation from. A genuine outsider with only the most marginal sort of charisma imaginable, he seems somehow the unlikeliest of characters to mount the stage of movie history, but more than 30 years after making his first appearance there’s no denying that he’s earned his place there.

I think I’ve probably seen Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) as many times as I’ve seen any movie, yet every time I revisit it I’m always caught off guard at just how abstract, even hallucinatory, those opening moments are that I’ve described above. I’m equally caught off guard by how goddamned young, even asexual, Jodie Foster is as the child hooker Iris, or just how deeply immersed Robert De Niro seems in the role of the titular cabbie Travis Bickle, how convincingly he nurtures Travis’ loneliness, alienated logic, and the notion that his movement toward vigilantism is inevitable and somehow even heroic, cleansing, this 20th century underground man determined to wash the scum off the mean streets.

“I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention,” Travis writes in his diary. “I believe that someone should become a person like other people.” As delivered by De Niro, the comical, crude poetry with which he expresses his delusions of conformity is marvelous, and just one of several elements that make Paul Schrader’s churned-from-the-gut screenplay one of the most perfectly realized of the New Hollywood era. And you can actually access the script as you make your way through the movie on Sony’s recent Taxi Driver two-disc set, stopping at any point to see how it matches with the final result. Its just one of a plethora of special features designed to entice fans who obsess over the film to a level that competes with Travis’ obsessing over his misguided vocation.

There have been a number of excellent multi-disc packages of Scorsese films in recent years, with the two-disc release of Raging Bull being a major standout. I’m not sure why it took so long to finally get Taxi Driver the same deluxe treatment, but its proven to be worth the wait. There’s good making-of type stuff and testimonies from everybody from Scorsese himself to his one-time student Oliver Stone to numerous New York City cabbies who remember just how mean the city streets were back when the film first came out.

There’s also a pretty smart little featurette that’s got plenty of interesting quotes from the always articulate Schrader, though the highlight of the whole package for me is Schrader’s full length audio commentary, where he discusses where he was at in his life while writing the film (i.e.: in miserable shape), how he’d connected with Scorsese, how they adjusted the project to best accommodate the cast and shooting conditions, how much of the film was scripted and how much improvised, and how little anyone expected the film to become the enormous success it did. Schrader talks matter-of-factly about the underlying themes of racism in the film, explaining why he though it essential that Travis attack blacks in particular, and why the racism in the film eventually became one of the factors that led to Harvey Keitel being cast as the jive-talking pimp Sport, a role originally meant for a black actor.

Taxi Driver is a film that speaks to the ages yet could probably only have come out of the particular conditions of its time. Its fixations are those of young, angry men, and Scorsese, Schrader and De Niro were just young enough to still really feel it. Its singular position both in its response to and shaping of film history is on exhibit all over the place, with Scorsese’s wildly adventurous playing with form indebted to his voracious consuming of the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, among many others. And it’s a film that’s finally a product of the heady 70s, that time when young directors with a newly-gleaned sense of film history's continuity could take control of their work, a time when mainstream audiences occasionally flocked to see films for reasons other than fleeting thrills (though Taxi Driver arguably has those, too), and the battle between art and commerce in movies found some near-perfect harmony for a few golden years. Taxi Driver is the grotesque child of that era, and one that deserves to be visited again and again.